What else could be expected from a Congress which represented the commercial and landholding classes? No prodding was needed to cause it to give the fullest protection to possessions in commerce, land and negro slaves; these were concrete property. But thought was not capitalized; it was not a manufactured product like iron or soap. Nothing can express the pitying contempt or the lofty air of patronization with which the dominant commercial classes looked down upon the writer, the painter, the musician, the philosopher or the sculptor. Regarding these "sentimentalists" as easy, legitimate and defenseless objects of prey, and as incidental and impractical hangers-on in a world where trade was all in all, the commercial classes at all times affected a certain air of encouragement of the fine arts, which encouragement, however, never attempted to put a stop to piracies of publication or reproduction. How sordidly commercial that era was, to what extremes its standards went, and how some of the basest forms of theft were carried on and practically legalized, may be seen by the fate of Peter Cardelli's petition to Congress. Cardelli was a Roman sculptor, residing in the United States for a time. He prays Congress in 1820 to pass an act protecting him from commercial pirates who make casts and copies of his work and who profit at his expense. The Senate Committee on Judiciary, to whom the petition is referred, rejects the plea. On what ground? Because he "has not discovered any new invention on which he can claim the right."[100] Could stupidity go further? All of the confluent facts of the time show conclusively that every stratum of commercial society was permeated with fraud, and that this fraud was accepted generally as a routine fixture of the business of gathering property or profits. Astor, therefore, was not an isolated phenomenon, but a typically successful representative of his time and of the methods and standards of the trading class of that time. Whatever in the line of business yielded profits, that act, whether cheating, robbing or slaughtering, was justified by some sophistry or other. Astor did not debauch, spoliate, and incite slaughter because he took pleasure in doing them. Perhaps--to extend charitable judgment--he would have preferred to avoid them. But they were all part of the formulated necessities of business which largely decreed that the exercise of humane and ethical considerations was incompatible with the zealous pursuit of wealth.